The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Redefining Data Roles in an AI World with Barry McCardel of Hex

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

In this bonus episode, Eric and John preview their upcoming conversation with Barry McCardel of Hex.The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, customer data infrastructure that enables you to deliver real-time customer event data everywhere it’s needed to power smarter decisions and better customer experiences. Each week, we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the Datastack show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to the Datastack show. We have a three-peat guest on Barry McArdle, one of our favorite people to talk to. So, Barry, I think it's every year. Our Spidey sense kind of says, wait, we haven't had Barry on in a while, so welcome back.

It is great to be back. I think there's something really fun about doing this roughly annually, because it's a good chance for me to even look back. What were we talking about a year ago? What's changed last year? Yeah. It's such a crazy time just in the world and technology that a lot has changed, and so it'd be fun to talk about what's going on. Yeah, for sure. Well, for those who didn't listen to your last episode, which, by the way, if you haven't, we talked about,

why building AI products is hard. Barry went super deep into a lot of the how-to stuff in the last episode. So definitely pick that up. We'll put it in the show notes. But Barry, for those not familiar with you, just give us the quick flyover of your background and Hex. Yeah. So I'm Barry McArdle, CEO and co-founder of Hex. I've been a data person, data nerd sort of my whole career, did a lot of different things. And then before and then started Hex with a couple co-founders I'd worked with at Palantir, and HECS now is used by over 1,500 customers globally to do their most interesting and sort of in-depth data work. And I think especially what we'll get into this, but especially in the last year,

I would say AI in thinking about how AI can vastly improve those workflows has become our primary focus. And, you know, from a company perspective now, I think we really do think. of ourselves as sort of the leading AI tool for doing data analytics and data science work. Awesome. So Barry, I'm excited to talk more about that. One of the topics we talked about before the show, I think we'll be really relevant for a lot of our listeners, is all of the change coming in the data space around AI. So specifically people that concern they're getting behind, concern their job's going to be replaced, or maybe just concern their team size is going to

reduced due to some efficiencies from AI. So we're going to dig into that on the show. What else do you want to talk about? Well, I'd love to start with that because I think there's sort of this macro picture of what's changing with technology, what's possible today in some really exciting ways. As you mentioned, though, I think it calls into question a lot of sort of our previous assumptions on what people's jobs look like, what tools are they using, how the lines in the stack are drawn. We're here on the data stack show, right? It's like, even like, what is the data stack anymore? Right. What does it mean?

You know, I think that's really rich to dig into. And one of the fun and slightly nerve-wracking things about having conversations like this in public is you're basically making a bunch of predictions and statements that's easy to go back and check. But I love that. I think it's fun. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. It would be fun to unpack that and make some predictions or to muse about this a little bit. And maybe I can come on another year. We can see we can talk about all the places in which we're right or wrong. Yeah. Awesome.

Yeah, and we'll go back and fact-check our previous episodes too. Maybe we'll have like a roundup. That'd be great. Cool. All right, let's hop in. All right, that's a wrap for the prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.